Howard Bockner. Antifa are the “brown shirts” of the Democrat Party and its current candidates for the 2020 Presidential election. When Biden praises Antifa his “liberal” mask comes off. The problem is that most people don’t notice, having been brain-washed with “progressive” propaganda. Biden’s former boss Obama was the past master of smooth talk and autocratic rule but always got high marks from the media. It’s almost seems much of America is tired of democracy and ready for authoritarianism. Democrats, aiming for one Party rule, give passive support to Antifa to squelch dissent – particularly the conservative kind. We are told that the time for dissent is over – ask Jordan Peterson, James O’Keefe, Breitbart, Mark Steyn, David Horowitz and conservatives who try to speak on university campuses. If Antifa is not stopped our freedom of speech will be a thing of the past.
Dangerous mobs are more than the sum of their cowardly parts when the parts are permitted to conceal their identity<
Antifa demonstrators wear bandanas over their faces during a protest to oppose the right-wing group “The Patriot Prayer Movement,” which was having a rally in downtown Portland, Ore., on Sept. 10, 2017.Natalie Behring/AFP/Getty Images
The “entartistes” of the 1990s were a group of Quebec-based mischief-makers who threw cream pies in the faces of political and corporate elites. Amongst their victims: Jacques Parizeau, Stéphane Dion, Jean Chrétien, and BMO head Matthew Barrett. Their motto was “You work for us. You can’t be too big for your britches or you’ll get a pie in the face.”
Reaction was divided. Some saw in the campaign only the humour of political satire. Others saw it as low-level terrorism. I don’t find anarchy funny in any form. I imagined being pied as a frightening shock to the victim. Pies — and milkshakes, the current trend, which began in the U.K. with anti-Brexiteers — thrown by light-hearted satirists can act as dog whistles to dark-hearted revolutionaries. If someone can get to you with a pie, after all, he can get to you with acid.
Or a milkshake with quick-drying cement in it that can cause burns, as alleged in a recent assault on conservative reporter Andy Ngo, out on his regular beat covering an Antifa confrontation with the far-right Proud Boys in downtown Portland, Ore. Masked Antifa members, who loathe Ngo for his continual exposure of their aggression and lawlessness, first milkshaked him, then stole his camera and launched a (video-captured) vicious assault on the slight, defenceless journalist. The Portland police were typically slow to act. At the hospital, a brain bleed was discovered.
Andy Ngo, a Portland-based journalist, is seen covered in unknown substance after unidentified Rose City Antifa members attacked him on June 29, 2019, in Portland, Ore.
The attack served to illuminate what all responsible people know and have long known about Antifa. Antifa stands for “anti-fascist,” and claims to stand against racism and far-right ideology, but many of them are merely thugs shoehorning bully impulses into a political boot. The militants have demonstrated that they consider any dissidents to PC dogmas fair game for intimidation, doxing or assault, any institution that offers them a platform asking for vandalism.
In Canada, in the 1990s and early 2000s, we knew Antifa under the rubric of the Black Bloc, which targeted civilians, notably journalists, for harassment or worse. In one of their anonymous posts, a Black Bloc representative wrote: “Sometimes, it is necessary to go against what the mainstream considers ‘acceptable,’ to break the law in order to do the ethical thing.” Ah yes, breaking eggs to make omelettes, the justification of every totalitarian in modern times for intimidating, imprisoning or executing nosy journalists and other pesky human obstacles to the realization of their respective Utopias.
Since early 2016, well before Antifa’s famous Charlottesville confrontation with white nationalists, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been warning of Antifa’s escalating truculence. In internal reports, the DHS classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence.”
Yet amongst leftist elites, Antifa arouses no particular revulsion. In 2017 Joe Biden described the Antifa gang in Charlottesville as “a courageous group of Americans.” And numerous mainstream journalists think milkshaking is a hoot, something to be encouraged, as long as it is directed at right-wingers. In May, CBS co-host Tony Dokoupil made light of the tactic: “In the latest of a series of attacks on right-wing politicians, Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage was doused with a milkshake yesterday. That was actually salted caramel if anyone is wondering.”
Ngo had a premonition of the risks he was running by reporting solo at the event. As he posted on Twitter: “I am nervous about tomorrow’s Portland Antifa rally. They’re promising ‘physical confrontation’ & have singled me out to be assaulted.” Fearlessly (perhaps foolhardily), he did not bring “protection” with him.
In December 2018, the Vietnamese-American Ngo spoke on air with Fox News host Tucker Carlson (who was himself doxed by Antifa and needs full-time security at his home as a result), about his reportage. The clip contains video of Ngo being harassed at previous Antifa events, illuminating the nastiness the alt-left dishes out to “diverse” conservatives they perceive as traitors. One Antifa supporter tells Ngo he should be ashamed of himself, “because you’re an Asian giving in to white supremacy, motherf—–s.”
Carlson alluded to Antifa as “rich kids in masks.” The masks are the key to their enthusiasm. Dangerous mobs are more than the sum of their cowardly parts when the parts are permitted to conceal their identity. Before 2012 in Canada, we had a law against “disguise with intent,” but that was replaced in 2013 with Bill C-309, which bans the wearing of masks during “a riot or unlawful assembly.” (The Portland police deemed the weekend incident an “unlawful assembly.”)
Civil libertarians protest mask laws, understandable in an era when a photo on social media of someone attending a politically incorrect protest can do them material damage. There are doubtless many people who mask themselves for good-faith reasons at political demonstrations. Antifa members are not them.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Thank you for your excellent notes on this matter, Adam. As for the Libtards taking over the country, I don’t know. Few rational minds would have imagined Hitler taking over Germany, much less Germany taking over Europe; but they did. Likewise, few rational Jews in the 1930s imagined the coming of the Holocaust; but it came.
These things are in God’s hands. Ultimately, the Nazis were defeated and the Jews won a powerful national homeland. The LIbtards will run the same course as their Nazi forefathers.
The left is actually getting away from free expression and speech. I do not call the liberals because real liberals used to argue on behalf of free speech. These people are for controlled speech that they agree with.
I had read that spending $600K (how can it cost so much anyway) to erase a mural of George Washington. This is almost the definition of stupid.
Do these lefties now think George Washington is the equivalent of Saddam Hussein whose statues where pulled down for free by the Iraqis.
So to be lefty you need to spend too $600K on what $10 paint can could do?
Read this article on the New York Times website. San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History
The school board has voted to destroy public murals by a New Deal-era Communist.”
Amazingly, a San Francisco school board dominated by ultra leftists has voted to destroy a mural on the wall of George Washington Avenue, because they think it glorifies white men at the expense of balacks and American Indians. They are so ignorant that they don’t even know that the artist was a Communist who agreed with them! And that the mural actually attempts to make the same points they do about evil white men like George Washington. The Times author, a full-time editor of their Opinion section, defends the mural, but only because he is less ignorant than the school board, and knows that the artist was a loyal Communist (presumably like the Times editor himself. Oh wow! This dustup between ultraleftists is extremely revealing of the truth of Barbara Kay’s assessment of the contemporary American left. Complete intolerance of dissent, combined with total ignorance of history and everything else. I tremble for the future of my country as these Jacobin-Communist fanatics steadily gain power. Will we go through the horrors of revolutionary Russia? Of the French Revolution? Oy day!
The masks that the antifa terrorists wear are identical to the masks worn by Hamas terrorists. This writer is much too kind to people who wear masks at political demonstrations. The wearing of a mask at a political demonstration is intended to intimidate onlookers or counterdemonstrators by communicating the idea that the wearers are bandits (who of course also wear masks) or terrorists, and you’d better watch out before disobeying or opposing them. The people who wear them are thugs.
“Antifa” “activists” claim they are antifascists, as the name the name they have chosen for themselves says. But they are actually fascists. Their claim to oppose fascism is Orwellian double-talk, or as Orwell puts it, “blackwhite” or “turnspeak” –meaning not only lying, but saying the exact opposite of the truth, accusing your opponent of being what you are.
It should not be forgotten that it was not only the Nazis but also the communists who engaged in street violence during the Weimar Republic period (1919-1933), In fact, it was the Communists who initiated the practice of assaulting people who attended rival relies ofr demonstrations. The Nazis were able to recruit large numbers of people to the brownshirt organization in part because of the fear and rage. that these communist activities aroused in many Germans. Ultimately, the Nazis were able to win these street battles because they were able to recruit many more army veterans and policemen to their cause, giving them the predominence of force that they needed to subdue their rivals.
This should be a lesson for the American “left.” When forced to choose between “left” fascists and “traditional,” rightist fascists, more Americans with military and police backgrounds may prefer the rightwing fascists. And the real danger that our political future may decided by street fighting rather than the ballot box should be a warning to us all.
The right to demonstrate peacefully is rightly enshrined in the ethos of any democratic nation.
And anyone found masked at any sort of political demonstration should upon conviction lose any and all rights to any form of government benefits whatsoever- healthcare, welfare, pension, housing, the lot, direct or indirect- for life.
This policy will sort out the extremists of both wings very nicely.